Susan Georgette
The Hi-Jacking Of An Ancestral Practice | I have always been interested in the world's landscape and how we manipulate and use it for food and leisure. Last summer I went on a tour of China and saw that even many of the historical sites there are being turned into a kind of theme park - the trigger being China's new middle class spawning a new giant industry of Tourism making billions of dollars.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the Southern Province of Guangxi
home to the amazing rice terraces of Longshen, tended lovingly and creatively by the Yao Minority people whose ancestors found this ingenious
way to grow rice up the sides of mountains when they had no flat arable land - 700 years ago. The farmers and their families who have worked alongside
them in the ricefields have been told that the rice is no longer for human consumption but now for tourist consumption. This has changed their way of
life drastically as well as economically. Now the tourists and the builders come and this
ancestral practice has been hi-jacked..................... www.luca-arena.it
